"The Measure"

by Gail Wolff Smith

We left UCity eager to explore a world beyond.

Behind us were steamy summer nights when the Cards’ game faintly echoed from radios on screened porches down the blocks, boughs of huge trees leafing over the streets, heat lightning in the air.
Ice cream at the Dairy Queen or Steak n Shake.
Musical productions on a high school stage where it seemed the whole town showed up to applaud.
Commonplace taken-for-granted friendliness lasting for decades before dissolving into East Coast cynicism.  (When a cake for a new neighbor or a welcome dinner for a new colleague is met by stunned “how kind!”, we know they did not grow up in the Midwest.)

We admired brilliance we found beyond UCity, yet we could never be awestruck because we had already seen fine minds in action.
We appreciated athletic prowess but knew it was not enough just to play a game well, they also had to be “good guys” like those we had watched grow.
We gravitated to scholars in academia – some became scholars ourselves – because we had already been taught by some of the best, women and men who also knew our names and our brothers and our cousins.

Our generation had tough times, even bloody ones.  Still we were strengthened because we had witnessed moral courage early.  Even when later we failed to reach our own best selves, still an ethical code was our inheritance.

Not always kind to each other – after all we were children, teenagers, ruled by hormones and worried about image. 
But the friendships we forged at UC were often deeper, richer than any others we would ever know. 
Borne of endless afternoons, Rubber Soul playing in the background, talking about everything and nothing, rehashing the present, gazing into the about-to-dawn future. 
We knew where our classmates lived, their mothers, fathers, extended families, the cars their families drove, the Temples and churches, clubs and ice cream stands they frequented, their politics and peculiarities. 
We remember how this one chipped her tooth, how that one got that scar over his eye, whose mother died too young and whose father went bankrupt - or hit the jackpot -  whose grandmother baked the best rugelech, and where the gap in their hedge was. 
We know what made them what they are today, more than their therapist or anyone they will meet now.

Alone in the wider world, never lonely because in our minds we are still part of a close community who knew us, cheered us, loved us, made us tremble with rage and joy.  This was the audience that mattered most.

Life is filled with sad events, danger, disappointment and we can’t stay frozen in youth.  But we can appreciate from afar who we were and what we did, how we became what we are today.

Gail Wolff Smith
May 2006

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